Is this social media’s opportunity to move beyond the social networks? Image: Shutterstock.

From responsive social marketing to viral videos, Dark Social is one of the developments to occur in social marketing that I have been most optimistic about in recent years. I’m optimistic about Dark Social because it could expand social-led thinking from beyond the social networks into the sphere of Customer Experience. By doing so, social media marketing can have a greater (measured) impact on the path to conversion. In particular, the consideration phase.

Alexis Madrigal from The Atlantic defined the term in his article. Pulling together examples from The New York Times, BuzzFeed, and Facebook, this post highlights four steps agencies and client-side social media teams can follow to build a Dark Social strategy.

Recently I was asked to speak before a very engaged audience at the meetup.com Sydney Online Marketing group. The presentation was titled ‘The Transition from Organic to Paid Social Media Marketing’. I’ve embedded the presentation at the bottom of this post. Proceeds from the evening went to dronation.com, to support earthquake relief efforts in Nepal.

My three key messages were:

The social networks unrelenting drive to generate ad revenue is redefining the Social Media marketing landscape.

Marketers need to understand and embrace the opportunities provided by Organic and Paid Social.

Marketers need to clearly understand the distinct objectives that Organic and Paid can achieve. That requires understanding the elements that define Organic and Paid as distinct forms of Social marketing. [Read more…]

I was asked to speak before a class of University of Sydney medical students about building an online presence. It was an intriguing offer as I usually speak before marketers and other social media strategists.

Only to be used when helping people make an informed decision.

In preparing for the presentation, I spent a lot of time reviewing the Australian Health Practitioner Regulatory Agency (AHPRA) advertising guidelines. AHPRA’s advertising guidelines are built to support the principles of the profession such as provide care for people. An example, is how the guidelines champion the benefits of advertising. The guidelines state “advertising can be a useful way to communicate the services health practitioners offer to the public so that consumers can make informed choices”.

Social Media can be an effective channel to support consumers along their path to making a purchase decision. But what if businesses adopted medical inspired guidelines to form Social Media marketing strategies? Here’s some ideas what it could look like if Doctors were Social Media Strategists. [Read more…]

Any opportunity to lift your head out of the daily grind and access new perspectives is always a welcomed opportunity.

Toronto is plugged in.

I had that opportunity when I attended the ClickZ Live Toronto 2014 conference. ClickZ Live is the evolution of the SES (Search Engine Strategies) conference and positions itself as an opportunity to ‘engage customers and increase ROI by distributing your online marketing efforts across paid, owned and earned media’. Here’s a quick overview of the three concepts that resonated with me.

Twitter has a quadrant chart that profiles content as Planned / Unplanned and Always-on / Tentpoles. The Oreo cookie Super Bowl blackout tweet was a great example of content that sits in the Unplanned / Tentpole quadrant.

View from the 28th floor of the Westpac Building – Kent Street, Sydney.

I think Mr Scott’s assertion was that brands participating in social media should have a process in place to create, produce and publish content that fits in the Twitter ‘Unplanned & Tentpole’ quadrant. [Read more…]

The challenge of focusing on both quality and quantity isn’t restricted to content marketing. (Image source: Shutterstock).

One of the biggest challenges a brand has participating in social media is maintaining an engaging and relevant presence.

It’s reasonable for a large brand to publish 3000 times a year across many social platforms (scroll down to the end of the post to see my assumptions). Achieving both quality and quantity is a massive challenge.

For brands trying to improve quality levels it needs to effectively track the performance of its published social content. That means analysing post types, content themes, audience engagement and the direct / indirect impact on corporate priorities (ex: brand awareness, product consideration, customer service etc).

Social media marketers need to anticipate what’s next to be successful.

Relying heavily on RSS feeds to effectively do my job, the closure of Google Reader was bad news for me personally. Although, it was good news for Feedly.com.

Feedly is was a competitor to Google Reader andquickly became the preferred choice of Google Reader users seeking a new RSS service. Feedly announced it attracted 3 million users in the two weeks post Google’s announced closure. [Read more…]

About me …

I am formerly the Head of Social Media at the Westpac Group and the Head of New Media at Telstra (Chief Marketing Office). I'm working with agencies and businesses seeking to leverage Social Media as a channel to support consumers along their path to purchase / conversion.

I can be reached at mike at socialcorp.com.au.

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One of the best business-related capabilities a corporate social media manager can have is demonstrating the value of social media marketing to internal and external stakeholders. As long as social media is considered ‘opt-in’, social media managers have an uphill battle to attract sufficient resources that enable campaigns to scale at mass. Here are three […]

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Is this social media’s opportunity to move beyond the social networks? Image: Shutterstock. From responsive social marketing to viral videos, Dark Social is one of the developments to occur in social marketing that I have been most optimistic about in recent years. I’m optimistic about Dark Social because it could expand social-led thinking from beyond the […]

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Marketers need to clearly understand the distinct objectives that Organic and Paid can achieve. That requires understanding the elements that define Organic and Paid as distinct forms of Social marketing.